On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the Coppell Technology Student Association (TSA) competed in the 2023 Texas TSA State Conference in Fort Worth, where 25 Coppell students advanced to nationals.

This was the first competition since the beginning of the pandemic to not have any virtual contests—all events were in person—and with a record number of people that competed at state.

“Our students just worked really hard,” Coppell High School TSA advisor Michael Yakubovsky said. “Everything that the students were doing this year was great. We took more students to state this year than we have in the past. Last year, we took 50 and this year, we took 65. So that was really great for them.”

Coppell also won first place in the state for National Qualifying Events (NQE) by having the most number of people place in the top 10 for all events. This was the second year in a row that Coppell won this accolade.

“It’s so impressive just seeing our chapter do that,” said junior Naisha Jain, Region 11 TSA president. “We have a lot of motivated kids, but we also have a lot that don’t do stuff. But seeing that we were able to get this for the second year in a row just shows that we are passionate.”

Eight of the students also competed in Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science (TEAMS), who qualified for nationals by placing in the top 25 in the country.

“A big part of TEAMS is that we are given a challenge, and we have two hours to build it,” said junior Tanvi Nikam, TSA social committee chair. “Our challenge was to build a luggage transport system using a cardboard box, where a ping pong ball would have to travel through the box for a minimum of five seconds.”

Qualifiers are receiving feedback from various sources to improve their projects before nationals.

“Our product idea was an app that can translate ASL to speech,” junior Abhilash Katuru said. “We plan to take our program to various school principals within the area, and talk to them to understand how we can integrate this into Coppell ISD schools and how people with hearing impairments in CISD can use our program to better facilitate communication. So we’re going to try doing a lot more field tests and field studies before nationals.”

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